by Rhonda Mason
That’s my man, Carsov.
“You know there have been calls in the Sovereign and Protectorate Councils for an increased military presence in Wyrd Space. With all this nonsense going on, there’s talk of an all-out war with Ilmena, even.”
That last had clearly been more than Carsov had heard. Sometimes Malkor forgot what it was like not to have a toe in the grandest sandbox in the empire.
“Three things,” Malkor said, holding up three fingers to mark off the points. “Three reasons the Wyrds need to be exonerated. One, if a war starts, Wyrds who are innocent of any act of aggression against us are going to die wrongful deaths. Two, if you don’t give a damn about the Wyrds, then let’s talk about your army buddies. Those soldiers are going to die in a war that never should have started in the first place.
“Three. I need to find the bastards willing to infect their own people with the plague. The bastards who did supply Trebulan with the TNV. Nothing is more dangerous to the empire right now than those people. Nothing.”
Malkor finished his beer and stood, leaving the bottle on the table. He wanted to push the point until Carsov handed over the file. Years of IDC training held him in check. He’d done what he could tonight to make his point; it was time to let Carsov chew on everything.
“You know how to reach me,” he said, and turned to search for Hekkar. His second in command looked to be throwing bones with Carsov’s two companions, each of whom looked giddier than he’d expected.
Carsov stopped him before he could leave. “Damn,” he said. “You’re not so bad at your job yourself.” He gave Malkor a mock salute and walked off.
Hekkar met Malkor at the door and they exited into the warm, humid night.
“Everything okay back there?” he asked Hekkar.
“Course. The two were getting chatty with their friends about IDC agents crashing their little bar scene, so I challenged them to a game of bones to keep them from starting trouble.” He grinned. “I think they liked the idea of bleeding an IDC agent of his monthly salary too well to resist. That, and I might have called them cowards when one of them tried to pass.”
Malkor let himself relax for the first time since leaving Isonde’s townhouse earlier in the evening.
“How’d it go with Carsov?” Hekkar asked.
How had it gone? Well, he thought. Carsov had at least been listening, and he hadn’t misjudged the man. Carsov had a clear morality and was far into the “right” side of “right and wrong.” He was military, though, and Malkor was asking for the most controversial and confidential file in all of Falanar.
“Eh,” Malkor shrugged. “It went well enough for now, I think.”
Hekkar stopped walking and stared at him. “You’re pegging all our hopes for getting that file—which might be our only chance to dampen this anti-Wyrd hysteria that’s rising—on one man’s conscience and hero complex, and you’re telling me it only went ‘well enough?’”
“Hey, I said ‘for now,’ all right?” Malkor kept walking, grinning as Hekkar’s string of expletives followed him down the street.
9
THE SICERRO, MINE FIELD
Everyone aboard the Sicerro seemed to be holding their breath. A minute passed. Five. Ten. Vayne didn’t dare move as they all stood in silence, watching the debris of the Mine Field shift beyond their hiding place in the freighter. A band of tension constricted his chest. It seemed as if any movement, a single movement, would bring back the rook and certain destruction.
And then there had been that blinding green burst of energy that had ripped one of the rooks apart. What the void was that? Friend? Or yet another foe?
Twenty minutes passed before Vayne felt he could take a deep breath, could relax shoulders so stiff with tension they ached.
::Are they gone?:: Corinth asked. No way to know. Not with the ship powered down and no access to sensors. Tia’tan let out a huff of breath and he knew she had reached the same conclusion—waiting would get them exactly nowhere.
“Minimal power,” Tia’tan said. “I want sensors, vidscreens, that’s it.”
Corinth flinched when the faint hum of power rumbled through the ship and the lights flicked back on. Kayla would have known what to do, what to say to steady the kid. Once, Vayne would have laid a hand on Corinth’s shoulder and sent a message of calm. Instead his hand hung limp at his side—he had no comfort in him to give.
“The hyperstream drive is definitely down,” Joffar said from his station. “Even if we make it to the edge of the field without the rooks reappearing, we won’t be able to catch a hyperstream.”
“We have a bigger problem than that,” Noar called.
What the frutt could be worse than being stranded in Imperial Space, stuck in the deathtrap of the Mine Field?
Vayne moved closer to Noar’s station to get a better look. The glowing map showed the curving line of debris that ended suddenly, delineating the edge of the field. They were close. So close.
Then he saw it, the way the curve continued, arcing back. Noar zoomed out and the truth of their situation became clear.
They hadn’t reached the edge at all.
They’d reached the frutting center of the field. A wide-open field of nothing that the Mine Field’s debris orbited around.
No, not nothing.
A gigantic structure floated in the center, spindle-like. The axis around which the entire Mine Field spun. What in the—
“We found it,” Noar said, and the words were almost a question.
“That has to be it,” Tia’tan answered. She reached out, touching the dot on the sensor array as if that would confirm its existence. “But where’s the Radiant?”
Noar’s fingers danced across the interface, screens changing rapidly. “No sign,” he finally said.
“Damnit, Kazamel,” Tia’tan muttered. “Where are you?” The Ilmenans on the bridge pretended not to hear.
Vayne had heard enough. Or rather, not nearly enough at all. “What is ‘it?’”
Tia’tan ignored him. “Send the message,” she told Noar. “Joffar, bring us to full power, spin up the engines.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Vayne reached out to grab her arm but his hand smashed into her shield. She glanced down at the spot as if surprised he hadn’t punched through. He could have with his psi powers. He still wanted to. Instead he forced himself to stand down. “Twenty minutes ago we were running for our lives, now you want to go back out there?”
“The rooks have cleared off.” She gestured to the map. “You want to wait until they come back?”
“You want to take our chances with something that can liquidate a rook with one shot?”
“They could have killed us and didn’t,” she pointed out. “And if that’s really the Yari, then the safest place to be is with that ship.”
The word safe didn’t belong anywhere in this conversation.
“Message incoming,” Noar said, before Vayne could press further. Noar played it—garbled bursts of static and jumbles of words. He played it again and all Vayne could make out was something about docking. “They sent the passcode back with it,” Noar said. He looked at Tia’tan, and for the first time since they’d been pulled into the Mine Field, someone smiled. “It has to be them.”
“Good enough for me,” Tia’tan said. “Luliana, take us there.”
“Across all that open space?” Vayne said. “We’ll be target practice if you’re wrong.”
Tia’tan gave him a determined look. “We didn’t come all this way to be wrong.” She turned her attention to the viewscreens as Luliana nosed them out of their hiding space.
Vayne glanced back to where Corinth stood alone. He was white-faced and breathing shallowly, eyes huge as he stared into the Mine Field. Sometime in the last five years, Vayne had lost the ability to feel that kind of terror, not without Dolan’s mind-control machine programming it into him. He could remember the genuine feeling, though.
He crossed back to Corinth’s side and stood silentl
y with him.
No one spoke as Luliana maneuvered them through the debris. The rooks had been herding them away from the center of the field on purpose, Vayne reasoned. Maybe it was more than fear of what lay at the field’s heart, maybe the rooks knew the Wyrds would find help there. It was a slim supposition to hang their hopes on.
Their journey through the last of the debris was anticlimactic compared to their frenzied flight earlier. They reached the edge without incident, and Luliana increased their speed as they launched themselves into open space.
No weapons fire came. No rooks flew after them. The massive spindle-shaped object grew large enough on the viewscreens to make out details.
“Holy shit,” Vayne breathed. “Is that—” He recognized the shape of the looming spaceship. Anyone from Ordoch would, in an instant. “When you said ‘Yari,’ you meant the Yari?” He couldn’t even put the impossibility of its existence into words.
Tia’tan nodded, her gaze never leaving the screens, as if to look away would make the miracle vanish. “That’s the Yari.”
“Holy shit,” Vayne said again, because nothing else could cover it.
The Yari was a piece of history, a relic of time past. It was a gigantic weapons platform built by his people a century ago, at the height of the Second Ilmenan War. It was supposed to be a game-changer for Ordoch, a weapons system so powerful that nothing Ilmena had would match it. It was being towed to its destination, the drives still under construction, when a rogue wormhole ripped open space and sucked it in. The Yari had been assumed destroyed when the unstable wormhole collapsed.
A message came through the system as they approached the station, this time the words perfectly clear. “Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere.”
10
ORDOCH
Cinni stared at the collection of hyperstream drive parts loaded on the hover cart. A pitiful pile of gently—and not so gently—used components, more like a mad peddler’s hoard than Ordoch’s one hope for freedom. It represented a month’s worth of stealing, dealing and kneeling. It took all the resources the uprising had to scavenge even this small amount of tech, and the meagerness of the collection filled her with fury.
She kicked the hover cart. “Damn those godsforsaken imperials!”
Mishe looked up from where he’d been gathering the last bit of heat shielding to throw on the pile. His sympathetic look only made her angrier, and she kicked the cart again before turning away.
She knew what he thought. What her superiors thought. Everyone walked on eggshells around her now, afraid she’d burst apart if they so much as looked at her wrong. Everyone in the base knew what she had done, what she’d volunteered to do.
Murder her mother.
Execute, she corrected. Execute Hephesta for crimes against her own people. For conspiring with the imperials. For turning traitor. The blast of the ion pistol as she’d fired it still echoed in Cinni’s head, but it was her mother’s eyes, her mother’s last look, that haunted her.
“I’ll be back,” she said over her shoulder, and stalked out of the storeroom. The guards posted outside nodded as she passed, their thoughts written on their faces: was she one of the most dedicated “soldiers” to the rebellion, or the next one in line to lose it over the choices they all had to make?
Get it together, Cinni.
The uprising had recruited Hephesta because of her position and influence, while they’d recruited Cinni for her zeal and dedication to gaining Ordoch’s freedom at any cost. That dedication would serve her well, and she’d keep on as she always had this last year—putting emancipation first. A citizen turned into an unlikely soldier.
She strode down the concrete tube that served as the hallway at this sublevel, boots ringing against the stone matrix with satisfying violence. She’d spent so much of her last year learning to walk silently, to be invisible, that it was gratifying to announce her presence with her walk. Here in the base, even if she was one of the foot soldiers, she wielded her own kind of power.
::I’m coming up:: she sent to Aarush, and stomped her way to the magchute. She pulled a flat sheet of foil tabs from her pocket and popped a dreamer into her mouth. The sedative would calm her agitation better than a shot or two of oblivion.
Aarush was in one of the briefing rooms on a mid-level with two senior operatives, going over, for the hundredth time, details of tonight’s raid. A raid she ought to be part of. All three turned when she entered. Aarush had a neutral expression on his face. The other two looked relieved.
“Give me a minute,” Aarush said to the rebels. They took their chance to escape from Aarush and his obsession with detail.
“We’ll miss you tonight, Cinni,” one said, and clapped her on the shoulder as he fled out the door.
Cinni waited until the door closed behind them to speak. “I should be going with them.” It was her most oft-repeated phrase since word came down that she’d been pulled from the raid. The official call was that she’d earned some R&R after her solo mission to assassinate Hephesta. The inside word, that Aarush himself had told her, was that the higher-ups were waiting to see if she’d self-destruct.
“I’m fine,” she told Aarush. Again.
He said the same thing he’d said every time they’d had this conversation. “It wasn’t my call to pull you.”
“It’s still bullshit.” If the uprising had official ranks, his rank would be somewhere in the range of colonel. He designed the strategies for the offensives, trained the Wyrds involved in those missions, and ran the raid side of things.
Aarush sighed. “Honest.” It might not have been his decision to pull her, but he could have fought against it if he disagreed.
Blast.
She flinched as she heard that ion pistol shot again, the one she’d unloaded into her mother. She saw that moment of recognition and realization in Hephesta’s eyes, when she understood what was about to happen.
Would that one moment mark Cinni forever?
“There’ll be other raids,” he said, “and your mission’s no less important.”
“Right. Letting a bunch of space junk hitch a ride on my carbon atoms to make it through the Tear.” She tried to sound blasé. He didn’t seem to buy it. In truth, stepping through the Tear was more terrifying than attacking an imperial outpost. In an attack her skills came into play. Walking the Tear to the Yari was like rolling the dice with your life. No amount of skill was going to change the way those pips came up if the already fluctuating Tear destabilized completely.
She felt the dreamer kicking in, slogging through her bloodstream, calming her.
“The Yari is our only hope for ending this occupation any time in the near future,” Aarush said. “You know that. Without those parts to complete its stream drive…” His brown eyes, a beautiful anomaly on Ordoch, flicked to the closed door behind her before returning to her face. “Come here,” he said softly.
She locked the door and then crossed to his side. She respected the distance he wanted to keep between them as her superior, and never approached him without an invitation, but if an opening presented itself she was damn well going to take it.
He was so beautiful, so confident, so perfect in every way. A star in the rebellion, a leader people would follow into death, and he wanted her. Even though no one said anything, she felt her status in the rebellion’s ranks elevated because she warmed his bed.
He wrapped her in his arms and she laid her head on his shoulder. The calm of him surrounded her, stilled her frenzied need for action, soothed her so recent loss. Her mother’s gaze couldn’t find her here, and his dead family’s ghosts couldn’t haunt him when they were together.
“I wouldn’t have sent you through the Tear,” he whispered in her ear. “I don’t like it.”
He didn’t say what they were both thinking: one of these days an order to cross the Tear would be a death sentence. A chill raced through her and he held her tighter.
She wanted to reach out to him, mind to mind, to know him on that int
imate level. As always, though, he kept himself closed off.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, hoping that would prove true. The Tear became more unstable each day. It was the most dangerous rollercoaster ride in the universe.
Aarush pulled back sooner than she wanted, leaving her feeling as uncertain as ever.
“So few people know about the Yari,” he said, in apology. “You wouldn’t know if your mother hadn’t told you.” True enough. The existence of the Yari was too important a secret to trust to most of the uprising. The fewer who knew, the safer their hopes.
“And with Gorang dead,” she said, “I happen to be the lowest man in the chain who knows. The most expendable.”
He didn’t deny it. The uprising against imperial occupation was more important than the fate of any one member. More important than all of them. She would sacrifice anything to see Ordoch freed, and though he might care for her, Aarush had the same dedication.
Even if her skills would be better used in the raid tonight, there was no one more appropriate to send through the Tear than her.
“I’ll be fine,” she said again. Aarush brushed his fingertips against her cheek. He looked like he might do more, but a knock sounded at the door, ending their time together.
“Let me know when you return,” he said, instantly morphing back into her intense superior. “Megara will want a full report on the drive’s progress.” He brushed past her to unlock the door and she felt herself dismissed.
11
ISONDE’S TOWNHOUSE, FALANAR
Three days left on Bredard’s ultimatum, Kayla thought, as she made her way to Isonde’s room the next morning. Three days left to find a way to undermine him and save their skulls.
She was returning from the quiet memorial service they’d held for Rawn, which Isonde was still too weak to attend. Kayla had never felt like such a fraud as she had at the ceremony, reading the heartfelt words Isonde had written for a man Kayla had barely known. At least Kayla’s sorrow was genuine, grief for a life that never should have been taken, a loss she was inadvertently responsible for.
